Author: Dan Kennedy

Welcome to Media Nation’s new home

I ended up moving more quickly than I had intended. But as of today, this is the new permanent home of Media Nation. After four years on Blogger.com, I decided I wanted a better-looking blog with the greater functionality offered by WordPress. Over time, I plan to consolidate my various other Web presences here.

Thank you to everyone for your comments and advice on the new look and feel. I agree with those who say the photo — taken in the booth at WBZ-TV (Channel 4) while political analyst Jon Keller was interviewing U.S. Rep. Stephen Lynch — is  distracting. No offense to Keller and Lynch; the fault is entirely the photographer’s. At some point I will come up with a better image.

Please adjust your bookmarks and your RSS subscriptions.

Many thanks to my former student John Guilfoil, the founder and editor of Blast Magazine, who helped me with the set-up process and is now assisting with tweaks to the design.

Tweaking away: What I know about CSS would not fill a tiny thimble. But I’ve managed to boost the body-type size by 5 percent and improve the contrast a bit.

Alpha-testers wanted

Shhhh … no one is supposed to know. But would you mind taking a peek at an early version of what may wind up as the new Media Nation? It’s built with WordPress, and you’ll find it here. Don’t bother clicking around — I’ve got a long way to go. I am strictly asking for your first impression. Better than the current look and feel? Worse? Or no different?

A Taylor-made Globe?

In what may prove to be very good news for readers of the Boston Globe, a group led by Stephen Taylor — a prominent member of the family that sold the paper to the New York Times Co. in 1993 — has, if I’m reading the tea leaves correctly, moved into the pole position to buy the paper.

Beth Healy reports in today’s Globe that Taylor and California-based Platinum Equity have made it to the next round, and that both groups will tour the paper around Labor Day. Meanwhile, a group led by Partners HealthCare chairman Jack Connors and Boston Celtics co-owner Stephen Pagliuca — pointedly described as having submitted “the lowest bid” — will be on the outside looking in. Whether that might change is unclear.

No new owner of the Globe, not even a Taylor, is going to restore the glory days. But the Taylors were very good stewards of the paper, and Stephen Taylor, a former Globe business executive, is said to be one of the sharper members of his family. In addition, a Media Nation source who knows him tells me he’s a good guy.

Connors, too, is a good guy. But he’s also involved in just about every civic and business group in Greater Boston, and it’s hard to believe he could offer the Globe the sort of independent leadership it needs. Given that he and Pagliuca are said to be interested in pursuing some sort of non-profit arrangement, you also have to wonder whether they’ve got enough capital to pull it off.

According to Healy, both the Taylor group and Platinum submitted bids to buy the Globe, the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester and Boston.com for about $35 million (a far cry from the $1.1 billion the Times Co. paid 16 years ago for just the Globe) and agreed to assume $59 million in pension liabilities.

Given that Times Co. chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. recently said price will not be the only consideration, I would think a group with deep roots in both Boston and journalism would have an advantage over Platinum, whose executives may be interested mainly in the real estate.

For big-money investors, $94 million is not an enormous sum. I suspect that what will separate the winner from the losers in this deal is the willingness and ability to keep losing money until the paper can be restructured into a profitable business. And yes, I’m confident that someone can do it.

More: Over at Beat the Press, Ralph Ranalli laments the exclusion of the Connors group, arguing that non-profit is the only viable model for the newspaper business moving forward. Ralph and I agree, though, that Platinum would be bad news all around.

Democracy and the Senate (II)

The notion that the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald represent ideologically opposite editorial positions is overblown. The Herald and its editorial-page editor, Rachelle Cohen, aren’t really all that conservative. And the Globe, whose editorial page recently transitioned from longtime editor Renée Loth to former Washington-bureau chief Peter Canellos, is just contrarian enough on issues like charter schools to keep liberals agitated.

An exception is today. The Globe offers its full-throated endorsement to Sen. Ted Kennedy’s proposal that would allow Gov. Deval Patrick to name an interim senator in the event of a vacancy. The interim would serve until a special election could be held five months later. With Kennedy’s battle against brain cancer apparently entering its final stages, the matter has taken on special urgency.

In supporting Kennedy’s proposal, the Globe criticizes the Legislature for having taken the gubernatorial appointment away five years ago, when it appeared that Sen. John Kerry might be elected president and Democratic leaders at the Statehouse did not want then-governor Mitt Romney, a Republican, to name Kerry’s successor. The Globe calls the 2004 law “a partisan bill.”

Which, of course, it was. And which leads the Herald to invoke that same 2004 action as a reason to reject Kennedy’s current proposal, in an editorial headlined “Hypocrisy factor.” Continue reading “Democracy and the Senate (II)”

Democracy and the Senate

Ted Kennedy, battling brain cancer, strikes exactly the right balance in his letter (pdf) to state officials on how his seat in the U.S. Senate should be filled.

In a story broken by the Boston Globe’s Frank Phillips, Kennedy endorses a 2004 law that took away the governor’s ability to fill a Senate vacancy and gave it to the voters instead. But Kennedy also calls for an amendment allowing the governor to appoint an interim senator who would serve during the five-month period preceding the special election. Finally, Kennedy suggests that the governor appoint someone who promises not to seek election.

The law was changed five years ago when it looked like Sen. John Kerry might be elected president. Legislative leaders wanted to make sure that then-governor Mitt Romney, a Republican, would not have the ability to choose Kerry’s successor. Once and future Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom refers to that on Twitter today:

Wishing Dems now calling for Gov to appt Kennedy replacement stood with Romney in 2004 when they took that power away from him.

(Fun random fact: I ran into Fehrnstrom on the summit of Mt. Monadnock recently.)

But Democrats did the right thing then, even if it was for partisan reasons. As Kennedy suggests, they should leave the law alone, but not let the seat go unfilled for five months.

The wisdom of the 2004 law was proved after President Obama’s election last fall. First, then-Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich disgraced himself and his office by putting Obama’s Senate seat up for sale — an action that led to federal corruption charges against him. The appointment went to the supposedly incorruptible Roland Burris, who turned out to be highly tainted himself.

Then, after Obama named Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York as his secretary of state, Gov. Donald Paterson turned the appointment of a successor into a circus, using anonymous aides to smear Caroline Kennedy, who wanted the job but was clearly unprepared. The post eventually went to an obscure Albany-area congresswoman, Kirsten Gillenbrand.

No one is suggesting that Gov. Deval Patrick would pull a Blago or even a Paterson. But senators should be elected, not appointed, as has been the case since the 17th Amendment took effect in 1913. Kennedy’s proposal honors that proposition while plugging an unnecessary gap.

Photo of Kennedy (cc) by Will White and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Don Hewitt, 1922-2009

I felt no need to say something nasty or snarky (or much of anything) yesterday when syndicated columnist Robert Novak died. He was, in essence, a minor figure, and he probably would have agreed with that assessment. I do think his sins have been exaggerated over the years, especially with respect to the Valerie Plame Wilson case. As Jack Shafer observed in Slate, it appears that Novak didn’t even realize the value of what he had.

On a strictly personal basis, Novak appears to have been well-liked, despite his reputation for prickliness. I once did a brief telephone interview with him for a profile I was writing of someone who’d worked with him. He was charming and generous with his time. I found his column to be a hodgepodge of indeciperable bits of insiderdom, but I enjoyed his glowering “Prince of Darkness” television persona. Late in life, Novak found his true calling.

Now we learn that Don Hewitt (photo), a longtime CBS News producer and the creator of “60 Minutes,” has died at the age of 86. Hewitt was a great journalist — among the greatest of his generation. No, “60 Minutes” has never been all that it could have been. But Hewitt was forced to work within the constraints of a commercial television system that put more and more emphasis on profit during the course of his long and productive career.

I think it was Hewitt himself who once said that, in one respect, “60 Minutes” was the worst thing that ever happened to network news. Why? Because it was the first time network executives realized they could make money from what had previously been regarded as a public-service obligation.

As with Walter Cronkite, Hewitt’s death’s is an enormous loss, bringing us back to a time when television news was better than it is today.

Howard Owens talks about The Batavian

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWrzex2yeoA&hl=en&fs=1&]
My spring-and-summer video tour of innovative online news organizations continues with Howard Owens, publisher of The Batavian, a for-profit news site in western New York state that he founded when he was director of digital publishing for GateHouse Media.

Owens left GateHouse earlier this year and took The Batavian with him. I visited him in late June and spent a few days interviewing him and other folks in Batavia. Owens, though, is the only one I captured on video.

Here are links to my earlier video interviews:

  • Christine Stuart, editor and publisher of CT News Junkie, which covers political and governmental news from the Connecticut State House, in Hartford.
  • Adil Nurmakov, Central Asia editor for Global Voices Online, whom I interviewed in Almaty, Kazakhstan.
  • Solana Larsen, managing editor of Global Voices.
  • Paul Bass, editor and publisher of the New Haven Independent, a non-profit news site.
  • Debbie Galant, co-founder of Baristanet, a for-profit community news site in Montclair, N.J.

The stories behind the Taliban story

With the election in Afghanistan just days away, GlobalPost, the Boston-based international news service, has weighed in with a first-rate multimedia presentation on the Taliban.

Reported by executive editor Charles Sennott and photographed mainly by Seamus Murphy, the package includes text, videos, a slideshow, a historical timeline, a Google map, and podcasts posted to the public radio program “The World.”

For Sennott, a former reporter for the Boston Globe, the project is something of a reprise. In 2006, Sennott was one of the principal journalists who helped put together a package on the war against terrorism, published on the fifth anniversary of 9/11. His “Reporter’s Notebook” of multimedia dispatches from Afghanistan and Pakistan was something of a pioneering effort.

In the GlobalPost series, Sennott draws on his long experience in the region, interviewing sources he first met years ago. And he offers some nuance that leaves you feeling uneasy.

Take, for instance, Sally and Don Goodrich, a Vermont couple whose son, Peter, was killed in one of the planes that flew into the World Trade Center. The Goodriches rebuilt their lives by founding a girls school in Afghanistan, in an area that has since been overrun by the Taliban. Not long ago they were presented evidence by U.S. military officials showing that some of their closest Afghan friends were Taliban collaborators. Sennott writes:

Sally described the scene that day, saying, “I am getting up from the table, leaning forward and I said, ‘These men gave me back my life.’ And [Army Brigadier General Michael] Ryan leaned toward me and he said, ‘And they are taking the lives of my men.'”

Powerful stuff.

“Life, Death and the Taliban” is grounded in the news but not dependent on it. As a result, it’s a resource that is likely to be as valuable three or six months from now as it is today. More than anything, it explains the human dimension behind an incredibly complex story.